US Senator Jeanne Shaheen said on Tuesday that she hopes Caesar Act sanctions on Syria will be lifted this year, and that Congress needs to do what it can to support stability in the country.
Ms Shaheen, a senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee, was part of a bipartisan group of politicians who worked to first enact the sanctions – known as the Caesar Act – in 2019. The sanctions were aimed at members of the regime of former president Bashar Al Assad who were accused of war crimes and human rights abuses.
"We've got an opportunity in the Middle East that we have not had in decades," Ms Shaheen told an event organised by the Council on Foreign Relations. "With Syria, the fall of Assad, there is the potential to see stability in Syria that will make a huge difference."
The Assad regime was toppled in a blitz campaign by opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, after more than a decade of bloody civil war. HTS has, in the months since, set up a transitional government and promised future elections.
"Now Assad is gone and so now we need to see what we can do to support stability in Syria," Ms Shaheen said. "That's how foreign policy should work. In my mind, we should find bipartisan agreement. We should figure out how to get things done."
Damascus has been working over the past year to secure sanctions relief from governments around the world. During his trip to the Gulf in May, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would remove Assad-era sanctions on the country, ahead of a meeting with Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara.
In late August, the US Treasury Department announced it was removing Syria from its sanctions list. And in June, Ms Shaheen and other senators introduced legislation a month later aimed at repealing the Caesar Act.
She was part of a bipartisan delegation that travelled to Syria late last month, where she met Mr Al Shara to discuss minority rights after weeks of fighting in the Sweida region between the Druze and Bedouin communities.
"Today’s meeting with leaders from many faiths was a testament to the Syrian people’s common cause: a country free from violence where people of many backgrounds can work together toward a brighter future," she said in a statement. "America is ready to be a partner to a new Syria that moves in the right direction."
During the discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms Shaheen called the Israeli strike on US ally Qatar "unfortunate" and a "significant escalation".
"I would hope that we are going to have conversations about that escalation and about how to reduce the threat of escalation instead of increasing," she said.
"I understand that they were going after one of the Hamas leaders, and we all agree that Hamas should be eliminated, but we have to be thoughtful about escalating things in a way that aren't helpful, especially when we've got this opportunity in the region."
